Beverly Ress

Visual Artist

 

 

Untitled, 2006Kleinbottle.jpg

 Rooted
2003, 30"x22"x5"
colored pencil on piled paper with cut paper

My work is an ongoing visual investigation of mortality. I draw carefully observed representations of things that have wandered off this mortal coil - birds, plants, bugs, and animals. Each is equal to the others in its mortality. I reinforce that equivalency by drawing them all in the same way: colored pencil on 22"x30" paper.

I believe in the power of representational drawing. To draw is to see. Sometimes the work is complete when the drawing is finished.

At other times the drawing becomes a point of departure. I have a desire to pull the pieces of the world together, to make whole sense of our fractured reality. Paradoxically, that urge has compelled me, at times, to take my drawings apart. "Mapping" began as the drawing of a root. It was extremely complex, and time consuming to create. After it was completed, I felt the necessity to literally cut it apart. In destroying the wholeness of the drawing, I made 2 new works. Each one became an object made of pieces of drawing. One explores DNA mapping, the other explores the dimensional qualities of the root in "Rooted".

I'm currently focused on bringing together some of the throretical shapes of the universe - torus, klein bottle, mobius strip - with drawings of mortality.

BALTIMORE CITY PAPER | 1/24/2007
From Deborah McLeod's review of "Between the Lines" group exhibiti| At Maryland Art Place
...Ress' "Untitled, 2006" [above] is a highly evolved representative of her recent, wondrous group of cutout drawings. These meticulous colored-pencil drawings float on expanses of white paper and share the paper's large open fields of emptiness with corresponding cutouts. Connected through a paper umbilical cord to its originating opening--which, importantly, is not severed during the process--the released cutout reaffixes to the page, made sculptural through the artist's folding and bending techniques. In this particular work, a three-dimensional ammonite form emerges to furl from the gaping paper reaching into its own structure. The enveloping form is inspired by the Klein Bottle theory of the universe, which illustrates how time and space cooperate on theoretical levels as a 3-D Möbius strip: a long, penetrable funnel that is simultaneously both inside and outside itself. Ress' visual product is an equally miraculous event in and of itself.

A selection of Ress's works
Works on Paper
(thumbnails show details; click on the images for larger view & information)

Works on Paper before 2002

 

Artist's resume
Contact & Pricing Information

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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